Affairs became lively in Lektawa for a week or two. Several would–be prophets died suddenly before order was restored and a new régime was firmly established. It was no man’s affair to discover what had become of the Nazarene slave or Beni Kalli and his daughter, so no effort was put forth toward that end. Had the fugitives known the outcome of their bold deed they might have spared themselves much anxiety. But that could not be. They fled along the caravan route that crosses the Western Sahara, and looked ever for the dust of a pursuing kafila. The Blue Man of El Hamra was in their thoughts, waking or dreaming, and many a league separated them from Lektawa ere their fear abated and they gave heed to the troubles that lay in front rather than to the vengeance that might be rushing on them from the rear.
CHAPTER XII
EVELYN HAS UNEXPECTED VISITORS
On a moonlit night in January, Evelyn Dane was sitting in the veranda of the big English–looking hotel which has brought more than a hint of Brighton to the sea front of Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. A dance was in progress within, and the jingle of a polka mixed curiously with the continuous roar of a heavy surf. But Evelyn was in no mood for dancing. While she was dressing for dinner that evening the boom of a gun from the harbor announced the arrival of a foreign warship. Soon afterward she learned the ship’s name, and from that moment she was on the tip–toe of expectation, for the captain of H. M. second–class cruiser Valiant supplied the one remaining link between her present embittered life and the rose–colored romance of a day at Plymouth.
Two months earlier, Captain Mortimer came to her in Funchal, Madeira, with a message that thrilled her with hope. The Foreign Office had requested him, he said, to forward any information she could give which might help to explain why Captain Warden should vanish so mysteriously at Rabat.
The inquiry was a private one. She must mention it to none, but it was deemed so important by the authorities in Whitehall that the Valiant was sent specially to Madeira to make it. There was not much that she could tell him. Her sole knowledge of Rabat was gleaned from Domenico Garcia’s message. She remembered the text with sufficient accuracy—but what a queer jumble of fact and fable it sounded! Even she herself, though she had actually seen the carved gourd bobbing about in the Solent, fancied now that the tattooed parchment supplied a far–fetched excuse for Warden’s disappearance.
Nevertheless, the sailor’s words had driven some of the hardness out of her heart. She was beginning to think that Mrs. Laing’s story was true—that Warden was really her rival’s promised husband—that he had not dared even to write again when he knew that Rosamund was at Lockmerig. But when this courtly officer assured her that Captain Warden had undoubtedly sailed for West Africa two days after the Sans Souci quitted the lock, she realized that, in some respects, her doubts were unwarranted. It was amazing that her lover had not announced his departure, but the ways of Governments are strange, and his fall from grace was by no means so great as she had been forced to believe. And then her tiny bit of blue sky was darkened by a new cloud. Although the captain of the Valiant, out of sheer kindliness, concealed the sinister outcome of Warden’s visit to the Morocco town, his very reticence induced anxiety. He was greatly interested in Garcia’s allusion to Hassan’s Tower, listened carefully to Evelyn’s story of the gourd, and, before departing, asked her to let him know at Lagos if she left Madeira. That was all. She had been eight weeks in Las Palmas without ever a word of her lover. The gloom in her soul deepened ever, until the clamor of the cruiser’s salute awoke the echoes.
Hence, Evelyn was one of the few people in the capital city of the Canary Islands who could supply a reason for the presence of the Valiant other than the need of fresh supplies of a vessel on the West African station. Nor was she wrong in the assumption that Captain Mortimer might call on her without delay. She had been seated not many minutes in the veranda, and had successfully held at bay only two of the half–dozen Spanish officers who wished to dance with her, when the sailor himself approached, and lifted his cap with a pleasant smile.